June 2009

KWL charts aid reading comprehension. That's what they were designed for at least.

What's a KWL chart? Let me explain.

Before reading a book each student writes down what they already know and what they want to know. Then afterward they write down what they've learned. They do this for two reasons. First, by forming questions they activate prior knowledge, which makes it easier them to learn. Second, it's easy for both the teacher and student to see exactly which ideas the student is and is not getting from the text.

That's the theory anyway. In practice, every kid hates KWL charts. Or at least I did.

Why?

They're completely useless. That's how they seemed at least. Plus they were annoying. "I already know know how to read, I already get the story, why are you making me fill out this dumb chart??"

But ultimately all this kvetching may have been a mistake.

Why?

As it happens, KWL charts are probably the single most important tool to improve creativity.

The reason is this. Every brilliant idea starts with a question. For example, let's say I want to know more about how it is that institutions and organizations use social status to exploit people. Chances are if I'm asking myself this question then this isn't my only question. Chances are I have a bunch of related questions. Like, how can one use the promise of social status in business to get employees to accept lower wages? How is social signaling corrupting our schools and universities? And so on.

The point is that when thinking about any sufficiently large topic you'll probably have one main question and then a whole bunch of sub-questions.

The problem is that when you start researching these questions you begin to learn. That doesn't sound like a problem, but it is.

What ends up happening is that you acquire all these new models that sorta answer your questions. For example, maybe you read Rosabeth Moss Kanter's academic papers on why people join cults like scientology. This all seems really insightful and intellectually gratifying. The problem is that this new knowledge displaces your original questions, even if they aren't fully answered. And what happens is that your original questions often don't seem as relevant or important in light of your new learning.

Even when they are.

Breakthrough insights always come from thinking about the space in between established knowledge and a good set of questions. And unless you write down your questions and theories in advance, what always happens is that you read a few books and then forget your original theories about how things worked. Which is bad, because they're often at least partially correct. So you had this brilliant idea, or at least the start of a brilliant idea, but thanks to your research it's been lost forever.

Even if you haven't completely forgotten your original theories, your new insights become inextricably bound with background knowledge in a way that makes it impossible to communicate your learning to the outside world. What happens is that you end up sounding like Shulgin trying to explain his experience with mescalin: "I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us." What the fuck.

Here's how to avoid this problem.

Whenever you're thinking about a big problem, write down all your questions and background knowledge in advance. Don't just write down your main question, write down every question whose answer could conceivably be insightful or useful to your intended audience. Then write down all your background knowledge. Not just a paragraph or two, but write down all your subject knowledge and all your theories of how you think things are working. (Preferably in a mindmap.) Don't do any research until this is done. Not even a Google search.

What ends up happening is that when you have both your questions and your background knowledge written down, it becomes ten times easier to think clearly about whether your reading is truly answering your questions. It's infinitely easier to come up with and recognize new ideas. And what's more, you still have your original questions written down so you have a clear framework for expressing your ideas to others.

The takeaway is this. You don't need a new method for coming up with brilliant ideas. You already have them. But sadly as you continue to learn these brilliant ideas are often lost. By using the KWL method you not only preserve your original insights, but you can use your research to expand upon them as well. By setting up a purposeful system that allows us to diff our background knowledge against existing models we can generate far bigger insights than would otherwise be possible.

You can tell it in a million ways. By the books people are buying. By the conversations they're having in their classrooms. By the politicians they elect. By the stories in their media. By the laws they enact, their rates of crime, and how they treat their prisoners.

Some countries seem capable of creating sensible policy through intellectually honest debate. Whereas in America and Great Britain, this hasn't happened for decades. Rather, our laws emerge from a haze of ignorance, apathy, and misdirection.

Why?

It all goes back to Dr. Spock and the industrial revolution. Let me explain.

In 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote a book that would change the course of history. His book, Baby and Child Care, became internationally famous for promoting the idea that when it comes to raising children, "you know more than you think you do." In other words, when it comes to raising your children you should follow your intuition. This idea proved revolutionary, and remains the dominant advice from pediatricians to this day.

The only problem is that it's completely wrong.

Think about it. When deciding how much calcium to give your kids, would you just eyeball the container of Tums and pick an amount that feels right? Of course not. And yet there are many other parenting best-practices that have been determined in exactly this way.

It's not that parents weren't raising their children this way before. They were, but since the 40's the wealth of scientific best practices have been largely ignored thanks to Spock's influence.

Which brings us to the industrial revolution.

As it turns out, a person's work environment affects much more than just their satisfaction at work. It alters their intuition and perception, their rhythms and routines.

Parents naturally raise their children according to their intuition, and as farmers left the fields for the factories their intuition about how best to raise their children dramatically changed. That is, factory workers began to raise their children using methods that echoed the way they were being managed in the workplace.

Sociologists have long suspected that, for example, children of factory workers would be implicitly taught that the best way to succeed was to keep your head down and obey authority. And while this might in fact make them more likely to succeed in a factory, it would also stifle their chances of upward social mobility.

There is no doubt that the worldview parents impart on their children vastly affects their chances of future success. But this is where the damage was thought to end. Experts assumed that because the effect of parenting styles on cognitive, physical, and emotional development is less salient than with the example of calcium above, parenting styles didn't really matter. It was all just a matter of preference. And that while the children of factory workers may lack certain advantages, this could be largely ameliorated later given enough school intervention.

But thanks to modern early childhood development research, we now know that the effects of factory-style parenting are much more toxic than previously assumed.

For example, the research of Hart & Risley has shown that over half of the variance in a child’s vocabulary at age 3 can be attributed to the ways in which a parent talks to their child, and the way parents talk to their children varies dramatically depending on socioeconomic status. Specifically, they estimate that by age 4 the children of professional parents have been exposed to about 45 million words, whereas the children of welfare parents have been exposed to only about 13 million words. Because of this by time children are 3 years old, parents in less economically favored circumstances have said fewer different words in their cumulative monthly vocabularies than the children in the most economically advantaged families in the same period of time.

"Even if we have overestimated by half the differences between children in amounts of cumulative experience the gap is so great by age 4 that the best that can be expected from education or intervention is to keep children from falling still farther behind. For an intervention to keep an average welfare child's experience equal in amount to that of an average work-class child would require that the chid be in substitute care comparable to the average professional home for 40 hours per week from birth onward." That is, already by pre-school the low-SES children are so far behind in language development that it is impossible for them to catch up.

Similarly, Hart & Risley found that the average child in a professional family was accumulating 32 affirmatives and 5 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 6 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a working-class family was accumulating 12 affirmatives and 7 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 2 encouragement to 1 discouragement. The average child in in a welfare family, though, was accumulating 5 affirmatives and 11 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 1 encouragement to 2 discouragements.

(For more on how language exposure and the ratio of encouragements to prohibitions affects childhood outcomes, c.f. Hart & Risley's excellent book Meaningful Differences in the Everday Experience of Young American Children.)

There's no especially good reason for low-SES parents to talk less with their children and use more prohibitions. They're just following Dr. Spock's advice and raising their children according to their intuition. Which, as it happens, is to manage their children the way their employers manage them at work. Raising children like employees has benefits that are immediate and hugely salient, whereas the harms created are subtle and visible only in aggregate through statistical analysis.

These harms are longitudinal; even as societies transition toward knowledge work, these flaws in parenting remain and reproduce themselves in future generations. When figuring out how to raise their children, parents look to the way their parents raised them. Parenting styles which caught on overnight may take hundreds of years to be displaced, because in each case the benefits are more salient than the drawbacks.

What's more, as white-collar jobs have replaced factory work an entirely new set of parenting flaws has arisen. Once again parents are raising their children according to their intuition, intuition which has been shaped and molded by their experience in the workplace. Success as a white-collar worker largely means developing the skill of being chosen: for the soccer team, for college, for internships, employment, promotions, and so on. This is the mindset underlying the methodology that high-SES parents adopt when raising their children.

Are these parenting practices good for a high schooler? Perhaps. But when applied to infants they're empirically damaging.

Many high-SES parents over-schedule and overstimulate their pre-k children in an attempt to impart an early educational advantage. By depriving their children of time for self-directed play they may be undermining executive function, the best predictor of future success. source

By forcing their children to read before they're ready, they may well be robbing their children of intrinsic motivation to read and contributing to future alliteracy. source

By letting their infants watch baby videos they are at worst contributing to future cognitive and behavioral problems, and at best dramatically decreasing their children's rate of learning. source

Again, these parenting practices stem largely from the intuitions parents pick up from their workplaces. Compared with using intuition to decide how much calcium to give a child, using intuition to make decisions like how much TV to allow an infant to watch is equally absurd and equally damaging, but largely ignored because the intangibility makes these decisions less salient and seemingly less important.

You can't measure bad parenting in parts per million. But the effects are just as real as lead poising, obesity, or thalidomide. And as with factory workers, these parenting mistakes will be passed on long after these working environments are gone.

I don't know why it is that certain countries seem so incapable of setting rational and coherent policy. I'm sure there are dozens of reasons. But I suspect a good percentage of the problem stems from a series of specific parenting flaws largely attributable to parents raising their children with intuition acquired in the workplace. The reason then that these social problems are most pervasive in countries like America and Great Britain is because these countries were the earliest and most extensively industrialized.

Every time we buy a cell phone, a flat screen TV, or anything produced in a factory, the damages are more than just the environmental contaminants and individual suffering. Rather, we're imposing a cultural shadow on ourselves, one which cripples our children and our children's children. This is a negative externality of the way we choose to structure society, a form of intellectual pollution far more harmful than anyone could have predicted.

This suggests a market opportunity for teaching parents to separate their parenting styles from the way they spend their day. But what's more, it suggests new modes of civic responsibility, and new answers to the age-old question of what it means to be a good person.